Chunking for RAG quality
Evaluate with evidence
Measure chunking with denominators, slices, and gates chosen before seeing results on the employee handbook assistant.
1Learn the idea
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Metrics
Track for chunking: recall@k on gold spans, citation entailment, duplicate rate in top-k, avg chunk tokens. Report fractions like 36/40, not vague quality adjectives. Segment by language, plan tier, document length, or other slices that matter for the employee handbook assistant.
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Protocol
Freeze inputs and neighboring versions while evaluating chunking. Change one control. Pair results case by case on the employee handbook assistant. Define hard gates (severe errors, privacy, latency) before the bake-off. Use deterministic checks where possible; humans for nuance; model judges only with calibration against gold.
Numeric reminder for chunking: If exceptions live 120 tokens after a rule and chunks are 80 tokens with no overlap, retrieval can return the rule without the exception—measurable as citation-support failures.
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Make it operational
Resist adding a twelfth metric before the first three for chunking on the employee handbook assistant have owners. This workload improves faster when a small scorecard is trusted than when a warehouse of unused plots exists.
Also pin one numeric memory from this chunking chapter: If exceptions live 120 tokens after a rule and chunks are 80 tokens with no overlap, retrieval can return the rule without the exception—measurable as citation-support failures. That number is not decoration; it is a template for how claims about chunking on the employee handbook assistant should look in design docs. Scoped specifically to chunking / employee handbook assistant / evaluation.
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Common mix-ups
People confuse chunking with neighboring buzzwords when debugging the employee handbook assistant. Before changing prompts, ask whether the broken stage was evidence gathering, the chunking judgment itself, validation, or the product action. Fixing the wrong stage creates folklore (“we tried chunking and it failed”) that blocks the next team on the employee handbook assistant. Scoped specifically to chunking / employee handbook assistant / evaluation.
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Rehearsal (chunking-for-rag/evaluation)
Write a five-line artifact for this page: goal, inputs, check, owner, stop rule. Invent one fluent failure that the check would catch. Keep details specific to chunking for rag rather than generic AI advice.
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Rehearsal (chunking-for-rag/evaluation)
Write a five-line artifact for this page: goal, inputs, check, owner, stop rule. Invent one fluent failure that the check would catch. Keep details specific to chunking for rag rather than generic AI advice.
Read
Rehearsal (chunking-for-rag/evaluation)
Write a five-line artifact for this page: goal, inputs, check, owner, stop rule. Invent one fluent failure that the check would catch. Keep details specific to chunking for rag rather than generic AI advice.
Read
Rehearsal (chunking-for-rag/evaluation)
Write a five-line artifact for this page: goal, inputs, check, owner, stop rule. Invent one fluent failure that the check would catch. Keep details specific to chunking for rag rather than generic AI advice.
Go deeper
Before you start
Why this matters
A demo of the employee handbook assistant looks great on three hand-picked examples of chunking. What does that demo refuse to tell you?
In the wild
See how this idea shows up as a product and a company — then come back to the lesson. Skills transfer across vendors.
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